Everything about Novell Embedded Systems Technology totally explained
Novell Embedded Systems Technology, or
NEST, was a series of
APIs, data formats and
network protocol stacks written in a highly portable fashion intended to be used in
embedded systems. The idea was to allow various small devices to access
Novell NetWare services, provide such services, or use Netware's
IPX protocol as a communications system. Novell referred to this concept as "Extended Networks", and when the effort was launched they boasted that they wanted to see one billion devices connected to NetWare networks by year 2000. NEST was launched in mid-1994, and given the timing it seems its true purpose was as a counter to
Microsoft's similar
Microsoft at Work efforts. The stack included drivers for then-popular networking hardware, including
Ethernet,
TokenRing,
AppleTalk (actually referring to
LocalTalk, a common confusion) and
ISDN, as well as higher-level modules for protocols such as Novell's own IPX, and AppleTalk, and later
TCP/IP. The
Netware Services Layer added support for application protocols, notably Netware client services such as file servers and network time synchronization, and the
NEST Requester which acted as a pipe-like endpoint for lightweight communications. Orthogonal to these services, NEST also included basic implementations of Novell's PSERVER and NPRINTER servers. Finally, NEST also defined an
operating system interface known as
POSE (
Portable Operating System Extension), which was a thin translation module defining all of the calls NEST needed to support its own functionality, things like memory management and process creation, which the developer ported to the particular platform of interest. NEST was deliberately written to be able to run from
ROM without secondary storage (ie, it had no long-term state it needed to store).
NEST didn't include its own
operating system, and was intended to be used on existing platforms and OS's. The code was deliberately modular, in order to allow developers to use as much or as little of the overall package as they needed. It was expected that developers would pick and choose the components they needed, for instance, a device reporting status over the network might choose only the NEST Requester, IPX and an Ethernet driver, removing the rest from their assembly. In contast, Microsoft at Work could be used in a similar fashion, but it seemed that it was generally expected that end users would use the complete system as the basis of their devices in a fashion similar to the later
Windows CE.
Like at Work, however, NEST appears to have seen little real-world use. After the initial release in 1994, there appears to be little news on NEST, followed by another flurry in early 1996 when TCP/IP support was added, at which point Novell claimed there were over 80 companies using NEST, including major office machinery firms like
Canon,
Hewlett-Packard,
Ricoh, and
Xerox. If any of these products actually shipped is unclear. NEST then went the way of at Work, and essentially disappeared from view.
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